Beech Nut.
We didn’t manage to hit the hill, Jack and I, until mid-afternoon. But the day was mild and damp and overcast and luscious. I met a fellow birder at the parking lot who reported having seen a pair of harriers and (possibly) a kestrel. I had high hopes of hawks.
But we saw no hawks. We saw a dense, yellow-orange landscape. Ochres and bronzes of oaks on hillsides, reds of brush and barren.
Horned larks in flight.
Yellow-rumps, still. A couple of flickers calling from disparate points on the hill. At the summit, I spotted a single flicker loping through the air toward where the second one had been calling. Heard jays, heard crows, but saw neither. Heard a jay. Heard a distant herring gull from somewhere out toward the bay.
Oddly, no sparrows.
Then, on our return, suddenly, a flock of maybe two dozen small birds appeared out of nowhere, fluttering down from the north, peeping in flight. We stopped. The flock of small birds headed straight toward us down the slope, losing altitude. I stood transfixed as they passed directly overhead, so near that I got a glimpse of dark marks on the face of one of them that swooped no more than two feet above my hat. Turned to see the whole flock collapse into the grass a hundred feet away. Then they vanished.
I hadn’t recognized their flight song. I didn’t know these birds. Were they pipits? Some kind of larkspur or something? I peered at where they landed, but just then Jack began scratching earth and that spooked the flock and they took wing again and together veered off toward the southwest and then around to the west and then up and overhead again, and then they landed again in the same field. But again I couldn’t catch a glimpse of any of ’em. No ID. I moved a slight bit—and at my movement they rose again and, peeping, fluttered off again, around again, over again, and yet again landed in the very same patch of grass.
Fall landscape.
This time I saw movement and snapped some photos. Only later could I identify them as horned larks. Wow. I never see larks. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen larks—certainly I’ve never seen them on Beech Hill.
That sort of made my day.
Otherwise, I heard chickadees and robins and golden-crowned kinglets. Crows. Nothing else to be heard. And no hawks to be seen. Only the great, open, fall-colored lanscape, with a mist covering the tops of the inland hills.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I saw a sparrow cross the road in a flutter—a very young bird. I decided it must be a white-throated sparrow.
Finally, a sparrow.
Today I learned what horned larks look and sound like in flight, and how they behave in the grass, crouching low, blending in, pecking nervously about, ready at the slightest sign of danger to take flight again together, in a dense flock, where they rightfully belong.
Beech Hill List
Beginning at 2:45 p.m., I hiked the open trail.
1. Yellow-rumped warbler
2. Northern flicker
3. American robin
4. American crow
5. Blue jay
6. Herring gull
7. Horned lark
8. Black-capped chickadee
9. Golden-crowned kinglet
10. White-throated sparrow
Elsewhere
11. Dark-eyed junco
Camouflaged horned lark.
Tags: American crow, American robin, black-capped chickadee, blue jay, golden-crowned kinglet, herring gull, horned lark, northern flicker, white-throated sparrow, yellow-rumped warbler
